shimage
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2004
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My (probably meaningless) contribution:
So, I would consider myself one of the worse types of skeptics in that, if I can't fathom how something can make a difference, I assume that it doesn't make a difference. You can rule out a lot of stupid things this way (the most obvious fake is the green-edged CD thing; it makes less than zero sense). This behavior is born largely out of a need for economy, by the way, so there is little that I ordinarily can test (although I think I've spent an order of magnitude more than just about everyone I personally know on audio equipment [this does not include just about everyone on this forum, btw]), so I don't really have many comparisons to speak of... That said:
Big-ish Difference
Obviously, using different headphones...
Using an admittedly crappy DAC instead of the analog outs on my AV710 (nevermind the DVD player...)
Using a Corda HA-1 MKII instead of a Go-Vibe (duh...)
Can't tell
Everything else
---------------------
In other news, I have recently returned from the APS "March Meeting", where I signed up for (and attended) the "tutorial" on acoustics. The organiser and final presenter was a lecturing professor at a research university (but his research is in low T cond matter, not acoustics; he just happens to be an audiophile as well). Now, some of what he said still doesn't really convince me, but I will state here what does make sense to me.
Postulate: The brain gives precedence to the time domain. It doesn't care so much about the phase information, but it does care a lot about coincidence. There is very very good coincidence detection [~10 microsec resolution] between one's ears and one's brain. There are experiments that purport to prove this, so I'm not going to dispute it.
One can understand a significant fraction of hardcore audiophile voodoo simply by accepting this postulate. Why do you put the different speaker elements in strange places? so that the timing is right. Why stereo subs? Why place them in the plane of the speakers? so that their timing is right (stereo because low frequencies are the most phase coherent, which doesn't really fit...). Why expensive cables? Because they have a faster response time (remember, you want <~10us). Discrete components? They're always faster than integrated circuits. No negative feedback? It slows circuits down; since we're intrested in transients, frequency analysis is ... well, inappropriate.
OKOKOK, but how much of this can you actually hear? He claimed it was obvious, but I dunno about that (he seems to have a budget about 50 times greater than mine, so it's not like I can check for myself). I tried out HD650s with stock and Cardas cables at a meet last January, and I couldn't tell the difference at all. But that was after listening for ... oh, a couple minutes, with 15 people yammering in the background, so who knows? What I do believe are his measurements concerning jitter. The guy took a Theta DAC, two cables, and some random people (I think ~10 or so) and tested them to see if they could spot the difference (looked like ~10--15 trials / person). No one made a mistake. So... I'm sold on the jitter, but the guy's DAC was ancient, so I figure a Benchmark DAC1 ought to do the trick, right
So, I would consider myself one of the worse types of skeptics in that, if I can't fathom how something can make a difference, I assume that it doesn't make a difference. You can rule out a lot of stupid things this way (the most obvious fake is the green-edged CD thing; it makes less than zero sense). This behavior is born largely out of a need for economy, by the way, so there is little that I ordinarily can test (although I think I've spent an order of magnitude more than just about everyone I personally know on audio equipment [this does not include just about everyone on this forum, btw]), so I don't really have many comparisons to speak of... That said:
Big-ish Difference
Obviously, using different headphones...
Using an admittedly crappy DAC instead of the analog outs on my AV710 (nevermind the DVD player...)
Using a Corda HA-1 MKII instead of a Go-Vibe (duh...)
Can't tell
Everything else
---------------------
In other news, I have recently returned from the APS "March Meeting", where I signed up for (and attended) the "tutorial" on acoustics. The organiser and final presenter was a lecturing professor at a research university (but his research is in low T cond matter, not acoustics; he just happens to be an audiophile as well). Now, some of what he said still doesn't really convince me, but I will state here what does make sense to me.
Postulate: The brain gives precedence to the time domain. It doesn't care so much about the phase information, but it does care a lot about coincidence. There is very very good coincidence detection [~10 microsec resolution] between one's ears and one's brain. There are experiments that purport to prove this, so I'm not going to dispute it.
One can understand a significant fraction of hardcore audiophile voodoo simply by accepting this postulate. Why do you put the different speaker elements in strange places? so that the timing is right. Why stereo subs? Why place them in the plane of the speakers? so that their timing is right (stereo because low frequencies are the most phase coherent, which doesn't really fit...). Why expensive cables? Because they have a faster response time (remember, you want <~10us). Discrete components? They're always faster than integrated circuits. No negative feedback? It slows circuits down; since we're intrested in transients, frequency analysis is ... well, inappropriate.
OKOKOK, but how much of this can you actually hear? He claimed it was obvious, but I dunno about that (he seems to have a budget about 50 times greater than mine, so it's not like I can check for myself). I tried out HD650s with stock and Cardas cables at a meet last January, and I couldn't tell the difference at all. But that was after listening for ... oh, a couple minutes, with 15 people yammering in the background, so who knows? What I do believe are his measurements concerning jitter. The guy took a Theta DAC, two cables, and some random people (I think ~10 or so) and tested them to see if they could spot the difference (looked like ~10--15 trials / person). No one made a mistake. So... I'm sold on the jitter, but the guy's DAC was ancient, so I figure a Benchmark DAC1 ought to do the trick, right
